“Lovestruck in the City” (도시남녀의 사랑법)

By Jae-Ha Kim
jaehakim.com
March 3, 2021

☆☆☆☆
 Park Jae-Won (played by Ji Chang-Wook)
Lee Eun-Oh (played by Kim Ji-Won)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

The first few episodes of “Lovestruck in the City” had so much promise, but it fizzled out due to a plot device that dragged on unnecessarily. I found myself muttering, “답답해” — a Korean word that conveys a feeling of frustration — to myself often.

Jae-Won is a handsome architect who takes a month-long vacation to the beachtown of Yangyang. There, he meets and quickly falls in love with a free-spirited woman named Seon-A. One month stretches into two, and when he’s called back to Seoul to deal with business, the two promise to reunite at Seoul’s Cheonggyecheon stream.

When she fails to show up, Jae-Won is left heartbroken and wondering what happened to her.

I’ll explain more in the Spoiler Alert below, but all I can say is that many of the characters in this series would’ve benefited with some therapy to work things through and move on from unhealthy relationships that should’ve been severed early on.

The final episode was tacked on to capitalize on the popularity of Choi Min-Ho, who finished his mandatory military duty last November. I wish there had been more episodes earlier focused on his police officer character and his burgeoning romance with an ingenue actress. Because while it was one of the more interesting episodes, it was also a weird finale to this awkward, but sometimes very good K-drama.

“Lovestruck in the City” is the first in a multi-part series — each focusing on other lead couples. There hasn’t been an announcement yet as to who will star in the next short-form series.

Airdates: Kakao M aired 16 half-hour episodes from December 22, 2020 to February 16, 2021.

Spoiler Alert: After catching her fiance cheating on her, Eun-Oh has a quiet breakdown (it seems) and loses all her confidence. She lost out on a job to a vivacious young woman named Yoon Seon-A. She throws away her phone and takes a bus to Yangyang, where she ditches her business attire and emulates Seon-A: dyed hair, flowy dresses and eschewing the corporate world for a job at a cafe. When she meets Jae-Won, who’s a bit Type A, she thinks he’s handsome. He is drawn to her and their impulsive relationship ends with a marriage proposal, complete with a (not legal) ceremony on top of his camper.

Now comes the frustrating part: I don’t understand why she used another person’s name. No one knew who she was in Yangyang. She could’ve introduced herself as Eun-Oh and still lived like a care-free woman and no one would have been the wiser. Because she had lied about who she was and presented herself as someone she’s not, she decides to deal with it by completely ignoring him after he leaves for Seoul. She doesn’t have the courage to be honest with him, she says, because she is the same meek Eun-Oh she was before she pretended she was Seon-A. This goes on for episode after episode, with her avoiding him and him becoming more clingy than ever, semi-stalking her after she repeatedly turns her down.

Meanwhile, their friends are a hot mess as well. Jae-Won’s cousin Kyeong-Jun (Kim Min-Seok) has been in a five-year relationship with Eun-Oh’s best friend, Rin-I (So Joo-Yeon). Like Jae-Won, he is an architect who makes good money. She has four part-time jobs, not because she can’t find a full-time job, but because she doesn’t want one. Her spartan lifestyle suits her and she thinks it’s wasteful to spend money on things she doesn’t need (like a second set of bedsheets). When she learns that he told his uncle (who’s also his and Jae-Won’s boss) that she’s studying to attend graduate school, she is heartbroken, because she realizes that he is ashamed to say that his girlfriend doesn’t have the kind of ambition that society admires and rewards. She explains to him that for her, making less money is a fair trade-off for her because she has more free time with little pressure to excel for a company. She breaks up with him, and rightly so. Though they were such a cute couple, being in a relationship with someone who is ashamed of what you choose to do for a living is not healthy.

Geon (Ryu Kyung-Soo) and Seon-Yeong (Han Ji-Eun) are another weirdo couple that broke up years ago, when she demanded he return everything she had bought for him, right down to his shoes. She is insanely jealous that he may be attracted to Eun-Oh or Rin-I (he doesn’t) and comes looking for him, whenever she’s drunk or misses her (I’m assuming deceased) mother.

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